From a distance, it doesn't look like a structure at all---just a dark green hump of banyan trees surrounded by canefields.
Closer up , you realize that the " hill" beneath the trees is man-made. There are foot-thick, vine-covered walls, sagging window casements and the twisted iron girders of a roof.
Sheets of corrugated roofing iron still cling to the rafters forty feet above what must have been a boiler room, but the rest of the roof has fallen in, forming a kind of jungle courtyard open to the sky.
Mejiro birds twitter in the banyans, and doves call softly in the stillness of this lost place. Even the light enters softly, screened by the vast canopy of foliage. In a few places, sunlight footprints the carpet of dry leaves beneath the wall, but most of the ruined building is in shadow.
While it lacks the antiquity of Angkor Wat, Nan Matol or other great ruins where a thousand monsoons have softened the works of man, the old mill has the same feeling of spent purpose and eerie repose.
It's almost as if the huge building, exhausted from turning mountains of cane into vats of molasses, weary of supporting the human community that once surrounded and depended upon it, finally caved in beneath its burden.
Reclining now in its last days, it has given itself gratefully into the green hands of nature, the planet's foremost masseuse. Tendrils of lilikoi lightly stroke the blue rock walls that trembled to the thunder of mighty engines, and muscular banyan roots knead and probe the old mill's aching foundations.
If walls could talk, what tales these could tell---of all the years and storms and engineering triumphs; of the ant lives which passed beneath this vaulted roof. No chiseled date stone remains above a fractured door, but the silence says enough: the men who built this place have gone.
In another part of the world, crowds of monkeys would shriek and chatter in these treetops, and green snakes with glittering eyes would slip like liquid through the vines. Ocelots would wait in the shadowed doorways, and bristled tapirs might root and snuffle in the court.
But this is a benign ruin, home only to lizards, birds and an occasional foraging mongoose. Horses were stabled here once, but they are gone. And Kolohe camp kids once "fought figs" on this forbidden battleground, but those kids have grandkids now.
So the old mill rests. The clatter of plantation tractors cultivating nearby fields brings a kind of reassurance---the work goes on---but human events are of little consequence now.
What is real is the moist caress of the Haiku wind, the toppling of root-lodged stone, the kiss of rain on upturned leaves.
September, 1983
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